Mujaheddin memories.

Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, by Steve Coll (Penguin, 695 pp., $29.95)

'IT's hard to be an ally of the United States," a Pakistani general is reputed to have said. "You never know when they might turn around and stab themselves in the back." This darkly humorous insight certainly applies to the U.S. effort against the USSR in Afghanistan, and the mishandling of its aftermath. Journalist Steve Coll's account of how the Afghan war, one of the most successful operations of the entire Cold War, was allowed to degenerate into the anarchy that helped create 9/11 is reliable, riveting, and frightening.

The proxy war that the Free World waged against the Soviets in Afghanistan was undeniably effective. At the cost of a few billion dollars in aid to the Afghan resistance, we bled the USSR of perhaps $100 billion. More important, the Soviets' failed Afghan invasion cost them their claim to be the leader of the oppressed masses of the Third World; it also angered the Arab world, spoiled the Moscow Olympics, and gave Solidarity in Poland a gasp of air. Eventually, the Red Army's forced withdrawal from Afghanistan ended the myth that history had a direction, toward the ever wider spread of Communism. It was a very thick nail indeed in the coffin of the Evil Empire.

The victory in Afghanistan in the 1980s remains instructive today, because it shows that the best way of affecting events in foreign lands is not necessarily to send troops, but to empower your friends to do what they want to do anyway. The trick is to use other people's patriotism to the desired ends. Proxy war is to preventive war what judo is to boxing: A black belt beats Mike Tyson every time.

Unfortunately, few victories pay just rewards to those who did the most to bring them about. Equally, few victories fail to produce unpalatable side effects. Just as the people of Central and Eastern Europe who suffered the longest occupations during World War II hardly benefited when the Soviets took over from the Nazis in 1945, so Afghans had few reasons to rejoice when the Red Army finally called it quits in February 1989. After an ill-judged attempt to remove the remaining Communist regime by making the guerrillas fight to take cities like a conventional army, the U.S. essentially lost interest in Afghanistan for a decade and stood by as the country tore itself apart.

That didn't have to happen. Coll confirms from documentary evidence something that has been obvious to any serious student of the Afghan scene in recent years: that the compromise, multiethnic government that is now giving the country its best chance in 25 years could have been established ten years earlier--sparing the country Taliban rule, and preventing 9/11. How could the U.S. have gotten it so wrong?

Critics of the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan are right that roots of the fiasco go back to the 1980s, but not in the way they imagine. It is simply untrue, according to Coll, that Osama bin Laden was a part of the U.S. operation against the Soviets, let alone a U.S. agent, as some more febrile minds have alleged. His name crops up as one of the young men who hung around in Peshawar on the fringes of the jihad against the Soviets but there seems to be no record of any operational contacts between him and U.S. authorities. With hindsight, this seems like an oversight. A good intelligence service should have made an effort to track the activities of allies of convenience, such as the Arab jihadists in those days, as well as enemies. On the other hand, imagine the fuss if it were discovered today that the relationship had been closer than it was.

Coll's documentary evidence confirms my experiences as well. I now wish I had taken a greater interest in the Islamic charities for Afghan refugees in Pakistan that Osama frequented, instead of killing time in Peshawar bars, waiting for convoys to go over the border. But the Arabs seemed to be a sideshow in those days, and they kept to themselves.

The real failure was not one of intelligence, but of politics. In the 1980s--as Coll documents--everybody and his brother knew that the lion's share of American aid to Afghanistan went to the most anti-American of the guerrilla commanders, the murderous Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. By contrast, the legendary Ahmed Shah Masud, who was not only a moderate by Afghan standards but one of the masters of irregular warfare in the 20th century, received a pittance, and that mostly in the closing stage of the conflict. The imbalance was made worse by the fact that the matching funds supplied by the Saudis went exclusively to the radical Islamists. This strange way of funding the mujaheddin was the result of the Faustian bargain that the U.S. had struck with Pakistan's military intelligence: You let us hit the Soviets, and we won't object when you favor your own tribal brethren or political clients. From the Pakistani point of view, Hekmatyar, a Pashtun radical universally loathed in Afghanistan, was the perfect anti-Soviet fighter to support. His very unpopularity guaranteed that he would not slip the leash.

But after the war, Hekmatyar--predictably--failed to consolidate Kabul; nobody has yet succeeded in ruling the country on the basis of only one of its myriad ethnic and religious groups. After he failed, the Pakistanis came up with the Taliban, a peasant mutation of the same idea: a pliable Pashtun regime in Afghanistan. Coll shows how Pakistan's relationship with al-Qaeda also deepened once the Americans stopped funding the mujaheddin and lost their leverage. Osama's planes to Afghanistan flew through Pakistani air-space. His lieutenants--including the 9/11 plotters--reached camps in Afghanistan with Pakistani visas in their passports.

Could Osama nevertheless have been stopped, before he sent his murderers to New York and Washington? Very likely so. Reading Coll's book, it is heartbreaking to learn how many occasions to liquidate Osama were missed. Plans to hit Osama at his compound near Kandahar were shelved, on account of possible casualties among Osama's family. Other operations were never tried because White House and CIA lawyers determined that he could be killed only while resisting arrest. At one point, Masud actually sent a team of his men--using mules, and without satellite phones--to fire on a base at which bin Laden was due to appear. CIA lawyers--to the Afghans' fury and amusement--tried to call the team back; the Americans were actually relieved when it was reported that the operation had failed to kill bin Laden.

With the publication of Coll's book, it is no longer possible to argue that the Clinton administration was less than grossly negligent in standing up to the terrorist threat. The CIA's Counterterrorism Center never received the institutional and budgetary backing it needed to do the job; Afghanistan never received the political attention needed to deprive al-Qaeda of its base. We will be paying the price for a long time yet.

Mr. Sikorski is executive director of the New Atlantic Initiative at the American Enterprise Institute. From 1986 to 1989, he reported, for a variety of publications including NATIONAL REVIEW, from the mujaheddin side of the war with the USSR.